Enlightenment Through Understanding

The Daily View: Wealth Creation and Inequality

Today’s good news: Obama’s approval rating keeps falling. This is good for stocks.

More good news: Oil prices are surging, benefiting the energy sector and increasing overall consumer spending through the resulting inflation.

The world is awash with so much liquidity as long term yields for major developed countries are at record lows:

In this huge post-2008 economic boom, the cognitive elite are becoming obscenely wealthy with little time and effort, forming insular enclaves of prosperity that still generate strong national influence. At the same time, this is juxtaposed with lots of people falling between the cracks. For example, this flash in the pan company just got bought out for half a billion dollars:

Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Sanford, MIT, Washington, Harvard – to name a few. These people of these institutions are shaping the world of tomorrow, writing the rules to the game according to their whims and desires that everyone else has to go along with.

The celebration of wealth, intelligence, expert status, and authenticity has become the new religion of post-2008 America. Like religion, it’s also a subject that generates considerable debate – in particular, pertaining to the study of wealth inequality and IQ and how they tie together. With few exceptions, all major social issues in post-2008 America boil down to race, IQ, education, and economics.

This is not surprising because of how overqualified and smart so many millenials are. As recently as the 90′s, many young people were content to holding boring, un-fullfilling jobs – but now they increasingly want jobs that are more complicated with a ‘higher’ meaning; others are completing college or returning to their parents. This is a good idea because why make your landlord rich when you can move back in with your parents until you’ve paid off your loans and or saved up enough to buy a house?

S&P 500 closes at another historic high; so much wealth in relativity few hands. In an interconnected world, we live in a panopticon of the state, our employers, and our indelible online record. As we’ve been saying since 2011, the easiest way to get rich to just buy stocks on the dips. Let the left complain about the economy being weak, like the pathetic whiners that they are. In the inexorable progression to a type one civilization, do do you want to be left out; or do you want own a piece? Companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon the are the architects of the Matrix in real life – buy their stock and make money.

The future of America is lots of people – many whom unable to find traditional employment- making breadcrumbs in the ‘gig economy’; a second tier of workers in the low paid service sector; third, a sizable upper-middle class consisting of bureaucrats, middle management, those who have modest wealth tied in stocks and real estate; and finally, a small cognitive elite that comprise the wealthiest

Pundits such as Jon Evans suggest a universal basic income to remedy poverty in an era where so much abundance is going into so few hands. From Techchrunch, he writes:

Indeed. But if more and more people become unemployed — by which I really mean, fighting to get by in Extremistan — then only one safety-net option will work: a universal basic income. Marc Andreessen is exactly right when he says technology can kindle the kind of economic growth we need; from my perspective, we need it to make a basic income a viable option. I just hope that happens before too many lives are ruined because our politics evolve orders of magnitude slower than our economies, much less our technologies.

We are of the opinion a basic income will only increase entitlement spending while failing to fix the underlying problems, hence we oppose it. While income inequality and the disparity between the haves and have-nots will keep widening, we don’t view this as a threat to the economy. Wealth inequality is a byproduct of an economy running optimally, by rewarding those who create value with more wealth. As measured by things such as profits & earnings, consumer spending, exports, technological progress, M&A activity, and productivity – there’s not a shred of evidence record wealth inequality is hurting the economy, nor is it possible to elicit any compelling evidence that it will in the future. Perhaps, it’s better to have more people performing low paid gigs and service sector work than enlarging the welfare state with a basic income. We’ve also explored other options of paying people to engage in passive consumption such as posting pictures to Facebook and tweeting, which may create more economic value than going to an overpaid job. In the years following the 2008 banking problem, many of the jobs lost were ones that didn’t create much value; many can agree the economy is better off without them.

The underlying problem is that too many people are unable to thrive in this economic boom without some form of federal aid. Due to the heritability of poverty and low IQs, we propose eugenics as the most effective long term solution for controlling entitlement spending.